Recalling the Other Heroes of the Anti-Apartheid Struggle

Oliver Tambo, center, with Nelson Mandela and Winnie Mandela at an African National Congress meeting in Soweto, South Africa, in 1990.Credit
Trevor Samson/Agence France-Presse

MUSWELL HILL, England — Far from the crowds pressing to offer a final farewell to Nelson Mandela, a lesser tribute yielded a reminder that he was not alone in the struggle for what he called the rainbow nation.

In a damp corner of a small park here, someone had left two bunches of red and yellow roses on a bust of Oliver Tambo, Mr. Mandela’s partner, first in a law firm and then in the leadership of the African National Congress, the onetime liberation movement that now governs in Pretoria.

For many years, until his return to South Africa in 1990, Mr. Tambo and his wife, Adelaide, lived in a three-story home in this suburb of north London, leading the A.N.C.’s struggle from exile as Mr. Mandela languished in prison.

This week, the days of celebration of Mr. Mandela’s life and the grief at his death have tempted some to limit the accolades to Mr. Mandela’s towering personality and moral authority alone.

No one, of course, would question his achievement in turning a prison cell into the inspiration of a nation’s struggle for freedom or, indeed, his remarkable surefootedness in skirting the racial tripwires of its birth. Indeed, the stark symbolism of Mr. Mandela’s incarceration offered anti-apartheid campaigners a simpler set of images to marshal global opinion against his captors.

But, as the flowers left for Mr. Tambo showed, some had other memories to complement those that filled the newsreels and retrospectives.

Looking ahead to Sunday’s state funeral for Mr. Mandela in his boyhood home of Qunu, for instance, it was hard to ignore many other burials that convulsed the land in the 1980s during the bloody unrest and emergency rule by the white authorities that defined the years leading to his release in 1990.

Sometimes the funerals were those of the foot soldiers, the comrades as they called themselves, caught in the daily clashes with the police and army. Sometimes, the burial grounds resonated to the revolutionary anthems marking the brutal assassinations of prominent activists, such as Matthew Goniwe and three others in 1985.

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“They were the true heroes of the struggle,” Mr. Mandela remarked later.

From afar, it was difficult not to trace the alchemy of armed insurgency, diplomatic isolation, economic sanctions, homegrown revolt and sporting ostracism that transformed the iron will of the Afrikaner elite into a readiness for compromise as the end of the Cold War brought a different geopolitical calculus.

For this reporter, ordered to leave South Africa in 1987 by the white authorities, the sometimes forgotten leaders paying their tributes at Mr. Mandela’s open casket in Pretoria seemed like a procession of phantoms from earlier times when black-ruled southern Africa marshaled what strength it had against the still unshaken bastions of white supremacy.

Here, bowed and walking with a cane, was Kenneth Kaunda, the former president of Zambia, and Joaquin Chissano of Mozambique, and Robert G. Mugabe, still in power, despotically so, in Zimbabwe.

Peter Hain, a lawmaker and prominent activist in Britain’s anti-apartheid movement, listed some of the elements that formed outsiders’ contribution in Europe and America. “Direct action demonstrations blocked all-white sports teams from touring, and international lobbying excluded South Africa from the Olympics and all major sports,” he said.

Then, there was disinvestment, he said, and the Free Mandela campaign and the refusal by American banks to roll over debt.

If the world went to South Africa this week to pay its respects to Mr. Mandela, it seemed, South Africans had gone to the world much earlier to seek its support.

The night Mr. Mandela died, I spoke with Tony Bloom, one of the white South African entrepreneurs who angered the apartheid authorities by meeting in 1985 with Mr. Tambo and other A.N.C. leaders in Zambia. Two days after his release in 1990, he said, Mr. Mandela called him in London to invite him for a private conversation at home in Soweto. Mr. Bloom flew out. The two men embraced. That, too, was part of the rainbow’s multichromatic spectrum.